But that's not what the paper says. It says Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) has gotten worse, not all types of turbulence. In this case, the flight flew through a convective storm.
Even so, the paper says there's been a 0.2-0.3% change in CAT:
> The largest increases in both absolute and relative MOG CAT were found over the North Atlantic and continental United States, with statistically significant absolute increases of 0.3% (26 hr) and 0.22% (19 hr), respectively, over the total reanalysis period.
And if you found research contradicting that narrative, it would risk your career and/or would not be published. There is only one way to think, not open discourse.
For instance, wildfires. It's definitely climate change because something bad happened. Not classical phenomena about wind currents drying out vegetation. Or increased human development into wild areas, or a century of PUTTING OUT smaller fires, or environmental regulations against harvesting lumber. No, the only way to think is the way that leads to more regulations, taxes and grants and government waste, criminal charges for the unlucky SOB who starts the fire, higher prices (in energy, cars, buildings, and insurance), and more human suffering that they can sell you their next solution for. For this reason, I don't believe a single thing they say anymore.
The irony that you are claiming everybody else will not listen to conflicting evidence while not providing any of your own and saying that you won’t believe anything unless it passes your own world view.
The irony is that if the CA forest were logged and the timber used to build homes, the price of housing would be lower, there would be fewer homeless people, more people with jobs, and few or no devastating fires (less CO2, you know, the big bad "greenhouse gas") . But admitting that would be heretical to the pseudo-religion that is leftism. The party profits when suffering increases.
I legitimately cannot tell if this is a parody comment or not.
It shows a shocking lack of familiarity with the effects of deforestation, carbon capture, logging rules for sustainability, land ownership for building the houses or even what the bottlenecks for housing currently are.
All to blame the intellectually bereft bogeyman of “leftism” when forests exist in many right wing states, and the right wing currently runs the government and yet even they don’t do what you’re suggesting…
>It's definitely climate change because something bad happened. Not classical phenomena about wind currents drying out vegetation.
>[T]he extent to which this trend is due to weather pattern changes dominated by natural variability versus anthropogenic warming has been unclear... Our results show that for the period 1979 to 2020, variation in the atmospheric circulation explains, on average, only 32% of the observed VPD [vapor pressure deficit] trend of 0.48 ± 0.25 hPa/decade (95% CI) over the WUS during the warm season (May to September). The remaining 68% of the upward VPD trend is likely due to anthropogenic warming.[0]
> Trust, but verify (Russian: доверяй, но проверяй, tr. doveryay, no proveryay, IPA: [dəvʲɪˈrʲæj no prəvʲɪˈrʲæj]) is a Russian proverb, which is rhyming in Russian. The phrase became internationally known in English after Suzanne Massie, a scholar of Russian history, taught it to Ronald Reagan, then president of the United States, the latter of whom used it on several occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union.
Also referenced in the Metro Exodus "Sam's Story" DLC because of the backstory of the two characters speaking, and nuclear weapons once again being part of the scenario.
For those interested, the competitive AoE2 scene is alive and well with one of its biggest tournaments, NAC5, going on now, an in-person LAN in Berlin.
> Our zero is for optimism. The notion that the externalized thoughts we write today may survive myriad years to a time when that fifth digit becomes significant.
That sounds like a bold statement. I would imagine the large majority of players of any mass-market title don’t know about or use any non-built-in mods.
It's going to depend on the game. Games like Skyrim are essentially just modding sandboxes, and you can measure this at least reasonably objectively. SkyUI is a single extremely popular mod for Skyrim. It's been downloaded by 6.5 million unique users from a single site hosting it [1], another 1.5 million on the Steam workshop, and who knows how many others from everywhere else.
That is almost certainly a vast majority of PC users using that single mod! This is also probably why Bethesda tried to make 'paid mods' a thing, and bring them over to consoles. Not only does PC seem to be their best selling platform, but people are largely buying Skyrim to mod it, and Bethesda wanted to try to start taking a cut of it.
On the other hand I'd completely agree with you for games where modding isn't so well supported. That results in more technical issues, and less impressive mods. I mean in games like Skyrims you have literally entirely new and complete games built as 'mods.' Some even get their own independent releases, like Enderal [2], which many would claim is [vastly] better than Skyrim itself.
~8 million downloads (and thats assuming duplicates don't get recounted?), vs 60 million copies sold [1] is still barely ~15%. This might mean that for PC, its more like 8 million out of 16 million and 50% of PC players are modding.
So in a best case, it's 50% of PC players (which may apply to steam deck), or worst case, less than 15% of all players (which may also apply to steam deck).
It didn't sell anywhere remotely near 60 million. That was an offhand comment from Todd Howard who was being a bit misleading. He was mixing all the different versions of Skyrim (Skyrim, Skyrim VR, Skyrim Special Edition) and calling them simply Skyrim as a whole. It's like saying "Mario" has sold a billion copies. If you're not familiar with the series, those aren't like 'game of the year' type collections, but distinct incompatible binaries. Each has their own incompatible mods.
I'm only talking about "Skyrim", the original game. It sold in the ballpark of ~25 million, with a probable plurality on PC - so somewhere in the ballpark of 10 million there. And no, like I mentioned, the download numbers are unique users - not total downloads. The total modding userbase is also going to be well upwards of 8 million. There are lots of reasonably sized non-English Skyrim modding sites also hosting SkyUI, and there's probably at least a small number of modders that have never installed that specific mod.
Most of the sales of the "original" Skyrim were on Xbox 360 if sources are to be believed, Wikipedia has the 360 version as selling 13.7 million put of 23. And the PS3 version may have even outsold PC. Obviously anecdotal but that's where most of my friend base played it too.
I think it's fairly safe to say that those numbers are unlikely. One of the only real specific, and accurate, figures we can rely on is Bethesda in late 2011 saying they'd shipped (not sold) 10 million copies to retail (which excludes PC). In 2013 they stated that 20 million copies had been sold (which would include PC). The two notes I'd add here is that they never gave anymore shipped numbers, which means they probably never broke another meaningful benchmark on it, and that console titles (with very few exceptions) are overwhelmingly front loaded in sales.
I'm quite confident on the PC sales, because there's an oddly consistent little metric. For games that sell beyond a minimum amount, about 1 in 60 players tends to leave a written review. So total sales tends to be in the ballpark of written_reviews * 60. For Skyrim, that's 180,000 reviews or 10.8 million sales [1]. Linked because the game's been unlisted since the Special Edition came out. That metric also matches the mod count near perfectly, as well as Bethesda's sales announcements, and also their behaviors like trying to do things like create 'paid mods' (and the predictable backlash it entailed). So I'd estimate reasonable figures would be around 10 million on the PC, and a 2:1 360:PS3 ratio for the remainder. So you end up with somewhere around 10 million, 7 million, 4 million, with a variance probably in the range of something like 30%.
It really is not a bold statement when specifically talking about Cities Skylines. That game would be nothing without its community of modders, it's what kept the game alive. For example, you can only unlock 11% of a map without a mod and even "mod free" playthroughs you'll find on YouTube still have to use a couple of them that don't affect the gameplay.
Sure, there are console players that have no means of installing a mod, but I'd be shocked if even 10% of PC players didn't use at least a couple.
> It really is not a bold statement when specifically talking about Cities Skylines. That game would be nothing without its community of modders
After being just about finished with the game, I decided to try some mods. Things that should address pain points, like indeed not actually being able to use most of the map, and traffic management.
The traffic turned into so much micromanagement to get cars to pick the right lane, and every time you made a change anywhere it required updating half a dozen other intersections as well, it just wasn't fun to grow the city bigger than possible in vanilla.
I remember one of the last games being an attempt at public transport only, where housing and shopping and such were accessible only by taking the subway. That worked super well in some aspects, and it's fun to design the mass transportation systems to underpin that city, but Skylines is so much geared towards vehicles that I didn't feel this was a proper city either. (From what I remember of a single game I played five years ago.)
Anyway, what I'm trying to say: based on my own and my girlfriend's experience, not everyone plays with memory-hungry mods, or any mods at all
I don't know why teenagers insist on taking a negative work and making it positive, especially when teenagers don't like adding emphasis to words so you have no idea whether they think it's good or bad.
Not that I was completely innocent of this at that age.
